I have, for years--since college--been a devoted fan of the 1950s series, The Honeymooners. I'd watched the series now and again when I was in my teens, but sometime in my junior year when the program aired nightly on an Albany station, I saw the program every day, to the point that I knew eventually all thirty nine episodes and could identify which episode one was during the first seconds of a program. I went to the first Honeymooner's Convention in 1984, received for my 50th birthday (alas before the internet made this gift unnecessary) VCR tape recordings of all 39 shows. I read the very extensive biography of Gleason, called The Great One, and am now a member of a number of facebook groups populated with folks like me. In one post I saw that there had been a biography of Art Carney called, go figure, Art Carney: A Biography. I took it out of our library and read it a few weeks back. If you're a zealot like I am, you might find it valuable. Even for me, I thought the book was a superficial chronology which did not tell me much more than I already knew. Carney was a considerate man, shy--certainly compared to Gleason--and a hard drinker. I knew he liked to bang them back, but did not know how at times his drinking interfered with his work on broadway. He was extraordinarily talented in terms of the kinds of roles he could play, and was self-effacing to a fault. I did not know that he did not get along with Walter Matthau with whom he starred in the original Broadway version of The Odd Couple, nor with Lily Tomlin with whom he starred in The Late Show a movie that came out in the late 70s. Both Matthau and Tomlin improvised so much that it was difficult for Carney to react. I found this interesting because Gleason was notorious for not rehearsing and improvising, yet Carney as Norton had no trouble with Gleason or the Norton role. In short, while I kind of sort of am glad I read the book, I think if you are not a big fan, you would find it too superficial to be of much value. I noted that in the beginning of the book, the author (Michael Seth Starr) thanks dozens of people for being willing to be interviewed. Art Carney (still alive when the book was published) is not listed.
Where I heard of Just What Kind of Mother are You, a novel by Paula Daly, I don't know. My guess is that it was listed somewhere as an outstanding debut novel. I thought it was very good. At first it seemed like a typical whodunit with a perp whose thoughts are written in italics interspersed with the main narrative of the novel. However, the book is more complex than a boiler plate mystery with a number of multidimensional players. There are two main characters. When the focus is on one, the story is written in the first person. When the focus is on the other, it is written in the third person. I think the author handles this well. While some characters certainly behave unconventionally particularly when you realize at the end what has occurred, the reader--at least I--recognizes that a point in the novel is that many families and many people that are, on the surface, conventional have their own very unconventional histories and motivations. The book reminded me of the line at the very beginning of Anna Karenina: "...every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. " A women, the mother of three, feels as if she has left her friend down. The friend's daughter is missing at a time when the community knows a pedophile is on the loose. Meanwhile a detective, very effectively drawn, is attempting to locate the pedophile. The book is well tied up at the end. While the book describes aberrant and disturbing behaviors, I nevertheless found the story and craziness believable. Recommended.
I liked the book so much that I looked for the next novel by the author. I couldn't get it easily, so I found the most recent one she penned. This one, Clear My Name, was not nearly as good as her debut novel. The story is not credible in many ways. The relationships just don't pass the sniff test for being likely. In this one a woman who works for a non profit that tries to free prisoners who have been inappropriately convicted, attempts to exonerate a woman convicted of murdering her husband's lover. That someone could kill a spouse's lover is not implausible, the coincidences in this book are not plausible. Also some characters are not realistic. The main character--the lead sleuth attempting to find evidence to exonerate the client-- has been given a trainee who is ostensibly learning how to do the investigative work. She, the trainee, is naive and not suitable. There is no explanation for why she was kerplunked to be the assistant. There is a biological mother who happens to run into the daughter she gave up for adoption and this daughter is a source of information about the crime. Finally, the main character simply would not do what she did at the end--not because she wouldn't have thought it was the right thing to do, but because of the enormous consequences of doing it. I would pass on this Daly novel, but I will give another one a try down the road because of how much I liked her debut.
